


come close

by muntjac



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Dreams, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24410629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muntjac/pseuds/muntjac
Summary: When Lucretia dreams, she dreams of them.
Relationships: The Director | Lucretia/Lup
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	come close

**Author's Note:**

> this is inspired by a dream i had and my many feelings about taz balance

When Lucretia dreams, she dreams of them.

It stops surprising her after the first couple of years that, for all she’s been through and all she’s done, she never has nightmares. She dreams free of the thoughts of black, nacreous skies that plague her while she is awake and instead dreams of the genial side of worlds she has visited and worlds she hasn’t.

Tonight, she wakes up, in what way she can in a dream, floating gently in a luminescent pool. While her skin is wrinkled and pruned, it is from the water and no longer from age. Her joints don’t ache, her breath has lost its slightly laboured quality and when she sits up and curls her hands into her hair she finds full, blonde coils. Ripples swell out from her where she sat up so hurriedly and she takes in her surroundings beyond the dripping stalactites that met her vision when she first opened her eyes. She is sitting up in a cave lit gently by a luminous algae that coats the damp rock that surrounds her. Sitting on a ledge and dipping her feet in the water, Lucretia notices for the first time, is Lup. 

Lup dips down to trail a slender finger in the water, creating her own waves that lap against Lucretia only a few feet away. Lucretia begins to weep.

“What’cha doin’ here, Cretia?” Lup inquires casually, still looking down at the water and seemingly unaware of the now full fledged tears streaming down Lucretia’s face “Thought you were planetside writing up all those manuals about the ship.”

Lucretia opens her mouth to speak and finds, as she always does when she sees them, her, even now - years later, decades later, a whole century later - she has nothing to say. 

Lup looks her in the face then, and grins at the grief she finds there. 

She gathers her robes as she drops into the pool and wades through the water toward Lucretia. She is farther away now than she was, her now much larger ripples no longer touching Lucretia and soon it takes long enough that Lup’s arms appear to tire and she drops her vivid red robes into the water, letting them flow behind her in a river of blood. She reaches her eventually and drops down to her knees in front of her, taking Lucretia’s hands in hers.

“Cretia,” she sing-songs, “Who’re the tears for, babe?”

Lucretia has advanced beyond sobbing now to near hyperventilation as her breath leaves her in heaving gasps that wash over Lup. Her hands scrabble up Lup’s forearms, begging for purchase as her feet slip and slide in the water below where she desperately tries to stand and run, away from Lup, away from how she is now, hair as short and eyes as young as the day they left their home planet. 

Lup is laughing now, in amusement or worry Lucretia isn’t sure, but she stills her scrambling as Lup brings her palms down to rest on Lucretia’s cheeks. Lucretia stills immediately and Lup lets out another huffing laugh as she looks Lucretia in the eye.

Lucretia knows that, had she not exhausted herself with her desperate escape, the look in Lup’s eyes of pure, unadulterated affection would make her crumble all over again.

Lup leans into her then, close, and as she does, she shifts and then she is Taako, with the same eyes but longer hair and an all-too-familiar grin, and then she is Barry, glasses fogged from the condensation in the cave and a much smaller, more private small on his face, and then she is Magnus, Merle, Davenport, before she is Lup once again.

Just as she settles back on her original face she presses her lips to Lucretia and Lucretia lets out a sob into her open mouth, gripping the hands still cradling her face. 

Salt-laden tears fill her mouth and she grips Lup’s hands like a lifeline before she is waking up, the pool around her gone but the tears remaining.

She drags a hand over her face and sighs heavily, pushing herself out of bed. She wastes no time lingering over a dream she has had a hundred times over and palms her white oak staff as she dangles her feet over the side of her bed and expects them to be damp.

Today, though she does not know it yet, Lucretia will meet three familiar strangers and fall in love all over again.


End file.
